names are scarcely known in history (but who were to the full as rude and lawless), were always at war with each other or with their neighbours. They kept the whole of the country north of the Sir and the Tian Shan in a state of tumult, and consequently closed to all foreign intercourse; whilst they were, besides, the means of weakening the governments—such as they were—of Khorasán, Transoxiana, and Alti-Shahr, and assisted in cutting them off from the West. In the days of the grandsons and early successors of Chingiz Khan, we find envoys like Plano Carpini and Rubruk traversing Asia with safety from the Ural to the northern confines of Mongolia, and there finding Europeans in the service of the Khákáns; the Polos could march backwards and forwards from the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, to China, and carry with them their wares in security; while preaching friars and missionaries, such as Odoric of Pordenone, John of Marignolli, William of Modena, and their companions, were tolerated not only as travellers, but as propagandists.
These are only a few among those whose names happen to have been preserved in documents which they, or their friends, left behind them, and which have survived till modern times. But for one who committed his experiences to writing, there must have been many of the same class who attempted nothing in the shape of a record, and as many more whose journals, letters, or what not, have been lost during the intervening ages, or which have not yet come to light. In short, all that we know of the early part of the Mongol period, or from the middle of the thirteenth century to nearly the middle of the fourteenth, points to order and security, and thus to a constant intercourse with the West and Europe. But for the whole of what may be called the authentic period of Mirza Haidar's history—i.e., from the second half of the fourteenth century until it closes in the middle of the sixteenth—not a single instance can be mentioned of a European having visited any of the regions of Central Asia, east of Samarkand.
If any there were, no vestige of them has survived; indeed, the party of missionaries, twenty in number, with six lay companions, who had been sent forth from Avignon in 1333 under Friar Nicholas, as Bishop of Cambulu (Khan Báligh), can only be traced as far as Almáligh, and seems never to have been heard of later than 1338.[1] The latter date would fall
- ↑ See Cathay, pp. 172 and 188–9.
